Teachers’ Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) has revealed that Nigeria would need up to 300,000 additional teachers or more to address the huge number of out- of -school children crisis it’s currently grappling with.
The agency said Nigeria has about 10.5 million out of- school-children nationwide and to take them off the streets into the classrooms requires at least 300,000 teachers to teach them.
The Registrar and Chief Executive of TRCN, Prof Josiah Ajiboye, gave this submission in an exclusive interview with Nigerian Tribune on Sunday.
He said it is, however, sad that Nigeria that is faced with gross shortage of qualified and competent teachers, particularly in the private schools, and in the northern region than the south, would need to recruit additional 300,000 teachers if the out-of-school children would be enrolled in schools.
He said getting such number would be a bit difficult more so that so many people are still running away to become teachers.
Quoting UNESCO’s statistics, Ajiboye said Africa has about 5 million shortage of teachers and Nigeria has the lion share of the figure.
He noted that it is even hard to believe that some state governments did not recruit new teachers in the last 10 years, adding that such development means that teachers who are retiring from service or died in such states have not been replaced.
He said that was why some primary schools in the rural communities for example, have just only one or two teachers, adding that such is a reality and not fantasy the country is contending with.
According to him, it is only a few states that recruit teachers often and even at that, no state in the federation has enough teachers in their schools.
“So, it is important that as a country, we engage not only qualified and competent teachers but also in enough quantity that will give quality education that the country and its people will be proud of,” he stressed.
Ajiboye while noting that only about 2.3 million teachers have so far registered as professionals with TRCN nationwide, he explained that the several million others are not because they have no prerequisite educational background to do so.
He explained that the aim of TRCN is to ensure that no unqualified person would be standing in front of students teaching in any of Nigeria’s school classrooms.
“We don’t want people to venture into teaching and be in classrooms teaching just because they couldn’t get job elsewhere in any of our schools nationwide.
“We call those kind of people nonchalant and we can’t surrender our classrooms and children to them any longer and we are standing firmly on that policy if we are genuinely wanted to move forward appreciably like the developed countries.
Ajiboye, however, pointed out that the reality now is that any state government that wants to recruit new teachers is making TRCN certificate mandatory for their recruitment.
He said the quality of education of a country would depend largely on the quality and competent of its teachers, hence the need for Nigeria to make do only with qualified and competent teachers.
READ ALSO FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE
and then